Comparing open and Sealed Bid Auctions: Evidence from Timber Auctions*

Abstract

a co-editor and our referees for helpful suggestions. We are especially grateful to Rob Porter for detailed and insightful comments. Dominic Coey provided outstanding research assistance. Athey and Levin acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation and Levin thanks the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Mechanism choice and the buy-it-now auction: A structural model of competing buyers and sellers

“…This would significantly complicate the entry game, as it would involve solving a dynamic programming problem as part of the entry process. Thus, I follow Athey et al (2011) in assuming the valuation to be unknown before entry. 19 The existence of fringe bidders is a convenient way of allowing revenues to depend on auction length (a stylized fact in many online markets) without having to rely on reducedform assumptions about buyers' preferences.…”

Time-based combinatorial auction for timber allocation and delivery coordination

“…Many types of auction models have been used to solve timber allocation problems and to ensure an accurate market price (Mead (1967), Hansen (1985), Paarsch (1991), Elyakime et al (1994Elyakime et al ( , 1997, Baldwin et al (1997), Haile (2001), Athey et al (2011)). Farnia et al (2013) simulated and designed an approach for multiple-round timber Auction.…”

Selective entry and auction design

“…To illustrate these assumptions, it is useful to describe equilibrium strategies in our baseline mechanism, which is the standard model used in the literature to describe most real-world auctions (inter alia (Levin and Smith, 1994;Athey et al, 2011;Athey et al, 2013;Krasnokutskaya and Seim, 2011;Li and Zheng, 2009;Bhattacharya et al, 2014). In particular, there is a two-stage game where, in the first stage, players simultaneously and non-cooperatively decide whether to enter, and in the second stage, the entrants compete in a simultaneous second-price or first-price auction.…”

“…Roberts and Sweeting (2015) and Roberts and Sweeting (2013) estimate a model of second-price auctions using data from US Forest Service timber auctions in the Pacific Northwest. Like ACL and Athey et al (2011), they allow for asymmetries between sawmills and logging companies, and for unobserved auction heterogeneity. From a modeling perspective, asymmetries between bidder types provide both a potential opportunity and a problem for identifying the parameters.…”